Phys.org November 25, 2020 Normally, algal cells fix carbon dioxide and produce oxygen by photosynthesis. An international team of researchers used sugary droplets packed with living algal cells to generate hydrogen, rather than oxygen, by photosynthesis. They trapped ten thousand or so algal cells in each droplet, which were then crammed together by osmotic compression. By burying the cells deep inside the droplets, oxygen levels fell to a level that switched on special enzymes called hydrogenases that hijacked the normal photosynthetic pathway to produce hydrogen. In this way, around a quarter of a million microbial factories, typically only one-tenth of […]
Tag Archives: Biofactory
First-of-its-kind hydrogel platform enables on-demand production of medicines, chemicals
Science Daily February 9, 2020 A team of researchers in the US (University of Washington, UT Austin) has developed a hydrogel system, portable “biofactory”, for harnessing the bioactivity of embedded microbes for on-demand small molecule and peptide production in microbial mono-culture and consortia. This platform bypasses the challenges of engineering a multi-organism consortia by utilizing a temperature-responsive, shear-thinning hydrogel to compartmentalize organisms into polymeric hydrogels that control the final consortium composition and dynamics without the need for synthetic control of mutualism. They have demonstrated that these hydrogels provide protection from preservation techniques (including lyophilization) and can sustain metabolic function for […]